A Semantic Representation for Domain-Specific Patterns

Design patterns are a valuable mechanism to capture and disseminate best practice in software design. The oft-cited definition of an Alexandrian pattern, “a solution to a problem in a context”, stimulates the definition of patterns from knowledge and expertise in any domain. Indeed, their application has spread from the object-oriented community, who first adopted them, through different software areas including human-computer interaction, virtual environments, ubiquitous computing, hypermedia and web engineering. This kind of patterns that describe successful solutions to recurring design problems in terms of a specific domain of application are known as domain-specific patterns. The increasing number of available design patterns is making difficult to find the most appropriate one given a specific problem since this task requires mastery on existing design patterns. Hence, there is a need to introduce a formalism to describe them accurately and to allow a rigorous reasoning process to assist users to retrieve those patterns that solve their problems. With this purpose, we propose a semantic representation for domain-specific patterns based on the domain knowledge for which they were written and for which an ontology-based approach is applied. This representation is used as an underlying armature for complementing the informal textual pattern description by means of semantic annotations. The combination of the literary pattern representation with its formal representation counterpart could assist an intelligent search engine that supports users not just for retrieval purposes but also for the discovery useful design solutions improving, therefore, their ability to develop quality software.